Calling All Widget Builders! (#2)
Written on April 10, 2009 by Andrew Wilson
The New York Public Library is updating its earlier request for the development of widgets for our homework resources (posted Feb. 27, 2009). Rather than building several widgets at all at once we’ve decided to simplify the process and build them one at a time, learning from the successes and problems of each before we build the next. Our first widget is going to be a List Building Widget that will include platform integration for iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace, blogs and web pages, and/or desktops. The widget will allow users to:
- Build lists of favorite book, movie, music, game, etc. lists
- Build lists of materials needed for homework projects
- Share lists with friends
We are looking for open source designs that can be made available to and repurposed by other organizations seeking to engage young people. The widgets will be developed as part of a 2008 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services titled Homework NYC Widgets: A Decentralized Approach to Homework Help By Public Libraries.
The project team will accept and answer questions about the proposal via comments on the NYPL Labs blog. Proposals for the List Building Widget should be sent as an email attachment to Josh Greenberg, Joshua_Greenberg@nypl.org, by May 1, 2009.
Filed in: widgets.
NYPL is calling all widget builders…
Our first widget is going to be a List Building Widget that will include platform integration for iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace, blogs and web pages, and/or desktops. The widget will allow users to: Build lists of favorite book, movie, music, game,……
Sorry if I’m missing something obvious, but where are the original records that you want users to be able to create lists of coming from? IE, is this a matter of using an existing API for an OPAC, or is it more general purpose than that? If you’re talking about allowing any web-enabled resource to be added, what level of metadata capture/reuse are you expecting? Is just grabbing the page title and allowing the user to annotate (like del.icio.us) enough?
As I read the current RFP, a basic text editor would practically meet the requirements, as long as it could be incorporated into Facebook, etc. and allowed sharing. I’m assuming you want something more data driven and integrated to other systems than that — but from the proposal it’s a bit hard to know what you’re envisioning.
Seems like the Zotero folks have already solved some of these challenges (like detecting web pages that describe books and parsing out info). And, although I haven’t tried it yet, the bleeding edge version is supposed to allow multiple computer sync via their zotero.org data repository in the cloud (with the optional use of a WebDAV repository to store attached files). Would one solution be to somehow develop widgets that would allow the user to see/share the data in their synced Zotero library from Facebook/iGoogle/whatever? And/or create a simplifed frontend to Zotero data that might be less intimidating for younger users? This would probably require some coordination with them — but it might be a better approach than trying to start from scratch…